McCarthy flourished during Cold War anxieties, with some parallels to
today's fear of terrorism. Levin said the hearings were a reminder of
"tactics (that) can be used to quiet dissenters" and the need to resist
"those who try to still voices of disagreement."

Secret Joe McCarthy Hearings Opened After 50 Years
By Joanne Kenen, Reuters, Reuters, 6 May 2003

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Fifty years after Sen. Joseph McCarthy's scorched
earth investigation into supposed communist infiltration of America's
most sensitive institutions, secret transcripts released on Monday add
another layer of tarnish to his place in history.

The 5,000 pages from his closed-door hearings show no smoking guns, no
uncovered spies, no verification of conspiracy theories on which he built
his political career.

"McCarthy had shopworn goods and fishing expeditions," said Don Ritchie,
the Senate's associate historian who began poring over the transcripts in
1976. He said the files won't provide fodder for any revisionists arguing
McCarthy was right.

No one McCarthy summoned went to jail -- even the few who were convicted
of contempt won on appeal. But his probes ruined lives and careers with
unproven hints of communist taint.

The documents were released in a joint venture authorized by Sens. Carl
Levin of Michigan and Susan Collins of Maine, then respectively the top
Democrat and Republican on the Senate Permanent Committee on
Investigations, McCarthy's platform.

McCarthy flourished during Cold War anxieties, with some parallels to
today's fear of terrorism. Levin said the hearings were a reminder of
"tactics (that) can be used to quiet dissenters" and the need to resist
"those who try to still voices of disagreement."

Perusing the 1953-54 transcripts, released online and in the Senate
hearing room where McCarthy held forth, shows that McCarthy in private
was like McCarthy in public.

His interrogation of an obscure engineer named Benjamin Zuckerman, who
had worked briefly with the U.S. Army Signal Corps, was a good example of
his brow-beating style.

Zuckerman testified that on his rare encounters -- four in eight years --
with a former college acquaintance later implicated in the Julius and
Ethel Rosenberg spy case, the two young men had talked about women, audio
equipment, and the best way to cook eggs. McCarthy snarled that he was
"either the damnedest liar" or "a case for a mental institution."

"Did you ever tell anybody that you believed in communism," McCarthy's
lead lawyer Roy Cohn once asked a security guard named Francesco
Palmiero, who had testified that he had walked past some communist
meetings near his housing project.

Composer Aaron Copland, mystery writer Dashiell Hammett, and poet-
playwright Langston Hughes are among the handful of celebrity witnesses
who appear in these transcripts.

Hammett refused to answer many questions. Hughes sought to explain how
racism shaped his political views. Copland, when McCarthy harshly pressed
for his views of U.S.-Finnish relations, calmly replied, "I spend my days
writing symphonies, concerts, ballads and I am not a political thinker."

But mostly McCarthy picked on the obscure and the expendable, file
clerks, engineers, mid-level bureaucrats.

He questioned one former army engineer as to why he hadn't known his
mother was a communist when he was a boy. He threateningly spoke of
looming perjury charges when witnesses said they didn't discern any
future spies in their college classes 15 years earlier. He badgered a
World War II veteran on whether he enlisted on the orders of the
Communist Party.

"I know you are not as dumb as you are trying to make out," he told a
secretary named Doris Powell who had once worked for what she later
discovered was a leftist publication, menacingly urging her to get some
legal advice or face the consequences.

A Wisconsin Republican, Joe McCarthy served in the Senate for only a
decade and his headline-grabbing investigations lasted a mere two years.
His final years, from his censure in 1954 until his death in 1957, he
served in relative oblivion.

But McCarthyism was longer and deeper than Joe McCarthy himself.
Anti-communist probes, sometimes camouflage for attacks on labor or early
civil rights activism, dated back to the 1930s and intensified in the
late 1940s with the Cold War.

Ironically, it was McCarthy and his excesses that not only gave a name to
the anti-communist drive, it was also his excesses that brought about its
end. "Once he was censured, the whole anti-communist issue dried up,"
Ritchie said.

Ritchie recalled that before McCarthy aide Cohn died, he dismissed
allegations he had destroyed lives. "Name them." he demanded. "Here they
are, these are the names," said Ritchie.

The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was the House of
Representatives' equivalent of McCarthy's Senate Subcommittee. If
Frank Donner's article isn't enough backgound for you, then see Ellen
Schrecker's The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents at:
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/schrecker-age.html

- Paul

Excerpts from The Un-Americans, by Frank Donner, 1961

Revolt of the Non Revolutionaries

For more than a decade we have been steadily losing our freedoms. The
obsession with anti-Communism and security, transformed into a national
psychosis during the McCarthy era, resulted in systematic attacks on
free speech, press, assembly and opinion. The policing of dissent by
agencies of government became a routine feature of our lives. Witness
the sedition prosecutions under the Smith Act, the intimidations of
the FBI, the rash of loyalty oaths, the security-screening apparatus
which blankets American industry, the emergence of the informer as
hero, the wave of deportation and denaturalization proceedings against
the foreign-born, the restrictions on the right to travel, the manifold
attacks on organizations and on the freedom of association, and the
congressional witch hunts.

True, the excesses of the McCarthy era have abated somewhat: the Army,
the State Department, and our libraries abroad are no longer fair game
for witch hunts. But our entire society is still infected with the
contagion of caution, fear and silence. At the root of the conformity
which has engulfed us is a pervasive self-censorship, a loss of the
sense that freedom is every American's birthright. Our people have come
to live in terror of being publicly identified with the minority. The
questioners, the "agin'ers," the come-outers and the dissenters simply
feel themselves to be too menaced by their environment to question, to
be against, to come out and to dissent. As the domestic frontiers of
our freedom contract, the Government drenches the world with renewed
boasts Of our free democratic life -- an irony which has amused even
our friends and well-wishers abroad.

The mounting opposition to HUAC stems in part from the conviction that
it has contributed enormously to our present plight. Because of its
repressive "fall-out," its impact on our basic freedoms has been
incomparably more destructive than that of any other government activity.
To be sure, dissent has been stifled by restrictive legislation, but it
has been wounded far more deeply by fear of public exposure and reprisal,
the Committee's most potent weapon. Like salt flavoring the sea, the
threat of HUAC's activities pervades the entire process of individual
and group expression on the vital issues of our time . . . Civil liberty
has been poisoned by fear of the Committee-fear of its subpoenas, fear
of being "named" by its informers, fear of joining or remaining a member
of a "cited" organization, fear of signing petitions, fear of supporting
causes or movements which might be condemned by HUAC. In the view of
many, we cannot find our way back to freedom unless HUAC is abolished.

The Committee's highly personalized use of its powers has also stirred
a torrent of protest. HUAC is supposed to obtain facts in order to help
Congress discharge its legislative responsibilities, Instead, it is
charged, HUAC uses the investigative power to attack the witness---"to
disgrace private persons," as President Kennedy put it.

A hearing is essentially a trial of the witness suspected by the
Committee of subversion -- but without any of the traditional safeguards
of a trial. Its purpose is to alienate the witness-defendant from the
protections of his society and to bring about his ruin. This use of the
investigative power is called "exposure," and has been a self-proclaimed
Committee objective from the very beginning.

HUAC's hearings have emerged as a modern counterpart of the ancient
pillory, a form of public humiliation and punishment. The, pillory was
an invitation to the community to work its will on the helpless victim;
so is a HUAC hearing. The use by HUAC of its hearings to expose and
punish was condemned by the United States Supreme Court in 1957 as a
perversion of the power to investigate. "We have no doubt," the Court
ruled in the Watkins case, "that there is no congressional power to
expose for the sake of exposure." Yet the Committee continues to point
the finger of suspicion, accuse, try and punish.

Here are some facts about the anatomy of these hearings: In the first
place, it is not a Federal crime to be a member of the Communist Party.
In fact, the Internal Security Act of 1950 provides:

Neither the holding of office nor membership in any Communist
organization by any person shall constitute per se a violation of
. . . this section or of any other criminal statute.

But the Smith Act makes it a crime, among other things, to advocate
knowingly the desirability of overthrow of the Government by force or
violence; to organize or help to organize any society or group which
teaches, advocates or encourages such overthrow of the Government; or
to become a member of such a group with knowledge of its purposes.
Evidence that a person is or has been a member of the Communist Party
or that he attended Party meetings or associated with Party members
would be links in a chain of proof that might lead to the discovery of
evidence needed for a Smith Act prosecution.

Let us assume for a moment that you are, or have been, a Communist.
This is a belief to which you have a constitutionally protected right.
Furthermore, you have never indulged in any criminal act in connection
with this belief.

Should you plead the First Amendment (which protects your right to
have a belief), you will be in contempt of Congress and liable to a
jail sentence and fine, for the courts have ruled that the free speech
and assembly protections of the First Amendment are not a valid reason
forrefusing to answer HUAC's questions. An answer might be a clue or
a link in a chain of proof of a Smith Act violation. Should you plead
the Fifth Amendment (which protects your right not to incriminate
yourself), then, because you refuse to deny that you are a Communist,
in the context of a HUAC hearing you are guilty by inference (it does
not matter that guilt by inference has been specifically condemned by
the Supreme Court -- remember we are now in a HUAC hearing). Despite
the fact that a plea of the Fifth is supposed to protect the innocent
witness who fears unfounded prosecution, HUAC uses it to defame and
disgrace the witness. Suppose you are ready to gamble with the risks
of prosecution and to answer the $64 question right out, "Yes, I am a
Communist (or have been)?" And the answer is very simple -- if you
answer HUAC's $64 question, in effect you waive the right to plead
the Fifth to any questions that follow: thus you are forced to inform
on former friends or associates, or go to jail on contempt charges.

But you may be completely innocent of any connection with the Communist
party whatever. You still have the right to plead the Fifth in order
not to "open the door" to further enquiry. If you swear under oath that
you are not, and never have been, a Communist, you may waive the right
to use the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering any questions about other
organizations which the Committee chooses to ask you. And even if your
denial is not a waiver, it would make the plea of the privilege about
other organizations so revealing as to be meaningless. Furthermore, if
you answer in the negative and HUAC refuses to credit your denial, you
may be indicted for perjury.

These are the mechanics of a system which weighs and disposes of our
lives. These are the rules of a game as weird as the legal proceeding,
described in Kafka's prophetic novel The Trial, in which an arm of the
state, moved by dark, concealed and vengeful compulsions, plucks out
and punishes men for phantom crimes.

In the course of its never-ending investigations, it has blasted the
careers of hundreds of professionals-writers, artists, teachers and
lawyers. It has made "unemployable" numberless talented men and women
in the mass-communications media and has forced the discharge and
blacklisting of many workers in industry. Hundreds have been branded
for life as traitors and reduced to pariahs. It has ruined the personal
lives and mental health of scores of its victims; its subpoena has been
a trigger of unbearable anxiety and fear. A HUAC appearance, or a
subpoena, contributed to the suicide or untimely death of at least 15
persons. It has often been argued that HUAC's toll of freedom,
livelihood, career, reputation and peace of mind is necessary -- an
unavoidable evil, a small price to pay to safeguard our security. The
liabilities, it is claimed, are more than offset by the assets. But
when we open the legislative account ledger and make a reckoning we
discover that after all the Committee's scare headlines, its never-
ending bouts with claimed threats to our existence and its
sensationalized disclosures about the Red menace, it can claim credit
for only one statute: the Internal Security Act of 1950, which was
vetoed by President Truman and still has not been approved by the
United States Supreme Court. One need not be a thrall of Moscow to
conclude that on the record the Committee has not justified its
existence.

HUAC is not merely the undisputed leader in its field; it is adjudged
by many, both in and out of Congress, "the most powerful Committee in
Congress." HUAC's life and times can only be described in superlatives:
it has broken more records than Babe Ruth. A 23-year-old marathon
investigation into a single subject -- Communism and subversion -- is
in itself a wonder of the legislative world. In the course of its
stupendous, generation-long, nonstop probe, the Committee has published
more than 50,000 pages of hearings and reports -- easily outdistancing
all other congressional committees combined in this respect. It has
issued over 5,000 subpoenas -- another record -- for it is estimated
that this exceeds the subpoenas issued by all other congressional
committees combined for the same period. During the term of its
functioning as a standing committee, it has cited for contempt five
times the number of witnesses cited by all other congressional
committees combined in the same period. It has heard thousands of
witnesses, some two or three times. In addition to a long list of
Washington hearings, it has conducted hearings in about 25 cities
-- in some of them several times.

Birth of a Congressional Monster

The House Committee on Un-American Activities never had -- and was
never intended to have -- a legitimate legislative function. Its
birth certificate is a blueprint of the exposure system.

The resolution of 1938 under which the Committee functioned on a
temporary basis authorized it to investigate (1) the extent, character,
and objects of un-American propaganda activities in the United States,
(2) the diffusion within the United States of subversive and un-American
propaganda that is instigated from foreign countries or of a domestic
origin and attacks the principle of the form of government as guaranteed
by our Constitution. . . . This resolution thus planted the Committee's
investigative authority with both feet in the middle of the First
Amendment. "Propaganda" is a method of communicating ideas. It was
impossible to investigate "propaganda" without evaluating those ideas --
praising some and attacking others. This was censorship by investigation.

When the Committee was created, Chairman Martin Dies acknowledged that
any attempt to prevent or punish unAmerican activities by legislation
"might jeopardize fundamental rights far more important than the
objective we seek. . . . But he found what to him was an ideal solution.
His Committee was, not going to introduce legislation banning or even
policing un-American activities -- propaganda or otherwise. That would
be unconstitutional. In unconsciously ironic deference to our fundamental
laws, he promised to confine himself to exposure -- independent of a
legislative end. He would expose and at the same time safeguard the
rights of the people against legislative trespass. What could be fairer?

HUAC was designated as a "special" investigating Committee with limited
tenure. It was to submit its final report on January 1, 1939, a scant
seven months after its creation. Chairman Dies told the House that he
was quite agreeable to this time limitation and that he would finish the
job in short order.

By the time January rolled around , however, Dies was pleading with the
House to extend his mandate for a full year. This the House did on the
Chairman's claim that there was more un-Americanism and more subversion
in the land than he had realized-and, unsaid, more newspaper headlines
than an obscure Congressman could get by any other means.

The antisubversive prober has a natural advantage in the investigative
sweepstakes: the deep-seated, emotional anti-Communism of most Americans.
The more farfetched his disclosures, the more welcome they are. He deals
in issues which trench to the heart of the Nation's existence. Their very
gravity commands that he be given the benefit of the doubt. And he knows
that if he strikes the right chords of sedition and treason with sinister
overtones of plotting and secrecy, a receptive press will carry his
accusations and warnings to every American hearth. Above all, he must
name names -- he must expose -- for it is always open season on Reds and
nothing is more productive of headlines than an attack on individuals.

If the antisubversive demagogue knows how to go about it, he can launch
a spiraling probe which it is impossible to stop. Overnight he becomes
a man with a mission, a scourge of traitors a defender of the Nation, a
patriotic awakener. Millions hang on his pronouncements; his press
conferences are thronged with eager reporters demanding new disclosures.
He lectures Presidents, shares the spotlight with the FBI as a savior of
our security, and becomes an authority on foreign policy whose warnings
it is politically dangerous to ignore.

In 1939, the Committee reported that while Congress lacked the power
under our Constitution to deny people the right to teach what it deemed
to be subversive doctrines, "it does have the right to focus the
spotlight of publicity upon their activities."

In 1940, the Committee avowed that its real purpose was not legislation
but rather "to inform the American people of the activities" of subversive
organizations by "turning the light of pitiless publicity" on them.

The Committee rapidly developed the notion that it had a unique, a special,
function -- exposure. "This is the only agency of government that has the
power of exposure," it reported in 1941. And in 1943 it announced that
"discovery and exposure" were its "special function" by mandate from the
House. In that year it published the names, positions and salaries of 563
Government employees, alleged to be members of the American League for
Peace and Democracy, because "the Committee felt that the Congress and the
people were entitled to know who they were." This was only one of the many
lists which the Committee published in the forties in the exercise of its
self-assumed exposure function.

The Dies Committee never doubted for a moment that it could use the power
of investigation to attack individuals, organizations and ideas on
political grounds without violating the Constitution. It seemingly never
occurred to the Committee that the First Amendment would be meaningless
if its prohibitions were binding on the Congress as a whole but not on its
investigating committees. And it actually boasted that it was engaging in
a nonlegislative activity -- the exposure of individuals. The Committee's
"temporary" status had become a fiction: its mandate was renewed each year
until 1943, when its tenure was extended to two years. Rooting out un-
Americanism became a way of life.

Chairman Dies had really struck pay dirt, from his point of view, three
months after the Committee was launched -- in the testimony of just two
witnesses. The first was John P. Frey, President of the Metal Trades
Department of the AFL, who for three days in August 1938 gave testimony
attacking the CIO as a Red-dominated organization. Without any
corroborating evidence at all, Frey cited scores of CIO unions as
communistic and listed 283 alleged Communists in CIO unions.

Frey was succeeded on the witness stand by Walter S. Steele, Chairman of
the American Coalition Committee on National Security, a confederation
of 114 patriotic organizations. His testimony was significant because it
marked the emergence of the vigilante network that became so important
to the functioning of the Committee. Steele, who had testified before
earlier antisubversive committees, charged some six and a half million
Americans with subversion. He placed the names of 641 allegedly
communistic organizations on the record and made Red charges against
thousands of individuals. He even cast suspicion on certain Catholic
organizations, the Boy Scouts, the Camp Fire Girls, and the American
Society of International Law. Following what has become a persistent HUAC
pattern, Steele bad little or nothing. to say about Fascist organizations,
which, at the time he testified, were fairly prominent throughout the
country.

Steele's testimony was too rambling and turgid to capture the headlines.
But Frey had organized his material with the press in mind: his list of
names was presented at the beginning of his testimony; each individual
name was numbered and was followed by an identifying description together
with data including the home city of the victim. The press blazed with
headlines: "Communists Rule the CIO. CIO Communist-Dominated From Top to
Bottom, Frey Testifies; He Names 283 Reds." Many of those named were
discharged and blacklisted in industry. The Committee gave Frey a
stunning weapon against his arch foe, the CIO, and at the same time
found an opportunity to perform some antilabor bloodletting on its own
account.

Thus the technique of exposure was born: the Committee would provide a
libel-proof forum for charges of subversion against named individuals
made without cross-examination and for no legislative purpose; the press
would publish the lists of names as well as the inflammatory trumpery
accompanying the names as a news story deserving the most prominent
coverage because it was testimony before a Congressional committee; the
community (including the employer) would do the rest.

Kenneth G. Crawford, analyzing Dies's success, pointed out:

It was probably the very success of the Frey testimony as an
experiment in publicity that awakened Dies and his associates to
a full realization of the potentialities of the political gold
mine that they had struck. From Frey on it was catch as catch
can with no holds barred. No patrioteer was too wacky to be
taken seriously.

While Frey was the prototype of a long line of friendly witnesses, J. B.
Matthews, a former Methodist missionary, teacher, pacifist, socialist
and reformed Marxist, was the first of a series of Committee ideologists
and policy-makers. Matthews not only built up the Committee's elaborate
file system, but, according to the late Howard Rushmore, was the "brain-
truster back of the Committee's relentless exposures." Matthews gave the
Committee its basic orientation at a time in 1938 when it was floundering,
and taught the Committee the neo-Archimedean precept that with enough
names in a file, one could expose the world. Matthews unburdened himself
for some ten hours in executive session as a witness before the Committee,
and shortly thereafter became its research director. Matthews was not only
a prodigious identifier, but an indefatigable bloodhound of concealed
"fronts." In his own testimony he reeled off over 100 organizations which
he claimed we linked in various hidden ways to Moscow. It was Matthews
who was responsible for the charge that Shirley Temple was a Communist
dupe. Matthews left the Committee in 1944 to become the behind-the-scenes
high priest of the exposure operation and the custodian of what is said
to be the most Gargantuan file on subversive names and activities ever
assembled. In 1948 Matthews was chief investigator for an antisubversive
investigation of the University of Chicago, and in 1953 he served for two
weeks as executive director of Senator McCarthy's antisubversive probe,
but was forced to surrender that post as a result of nation-wide protests
over an article in which he linked at least 7,000 Protestant clergymen
with subversion. His prior testimony remained on the record, unquestioned
by the Committee. Meanwhile, the Committee was discovering other powerful
reasons to remain in existence. An antisubversive probe had found broader
objectives than the exposure of individuals or the probers' political self-
aggrandizement. The ultimate aim was the exploitation of anti-Communism as
an instrument of political leverage, a means of handicapping the achievement
of legitimate national goals. The Dies Committee unceasingly attacked the
New Deal by discrediting its programs as communistic and un-American. It
undermined the implementation of these programs by exposing and calling for
the dismissal of "subversive" New Dealers.

With all of its great power, the Committee was to have no legislative
responsibilities. In theory an agent of Congress, its functions were in no
way related to the duties of Congress. Its real purpose as an investigating
committee was to smite the political infidel, not to report findings to
Congress. The result could only be to emancipate the Committee from the
supervision of the House, which exercises ultimate control over its c
ommittees through the lawmaking process. It could "investigate" whomever
and whenever it wanted without concern about its legislative productivity.
Congressman Dies had explained that this new power of exposure was more
valuable than legislation because it avoided constitutional problems!
There was no need to waste time in legislative hearings or in drafting
reports on dull and technical bills; let the other standing committees,
with a clearly defined jurisdiction, do this grubby work.

While other standing committees had to get authority from the House to
conduct investigations with the power of subpoena, the Committee had carte
blanche. Just what is un-American activity? The law defines crimes against
the state, and persons committing such crimes are admittedly un-American.
But is it un-American to hold an unpopular opinion, or take an attitude
that is also held or taken by Communists?

Thus, the permanent Committee was born, fully equipped with all of
the basic components of the exposure system: (1) it was functionally
independent of the body which created it, because (2) it lacked legislative
responsibilities; (3) its investigative power was shaped to inquisitorial
ends and conferred upon it by (4) a charter to probe speech and ideas so
broad and vague as to impose no meaningful restraints upon it.

Anatomy of a Hate Group

In the fall of 1960 a fire-bomb was thrown against the front of the office
of the Citizens' Committee to Protect American Freedom, a Los Angeles group
formed to oppose HUAC. The bomb shattered the door and started a fire. The
bombing came shortly after a huge swastika was smeared on the door of the
Citizens' Committee offices. The mailbox was shot off. An attempt was made
to set fire to the home of Frank Wilkinson, the group's secretary, a leading
figure in the movement to abolish HUAC (now serving a one-year jail term for
contempt of the Committee). Wilkinson's wife received anonymous telephone
calls threatening his life. Wilkinson's life insurance was canceled. Log
Angeles students who joined him in a TV program in opposition to HUAC barely
escaped a beating by thugs after they left the studio. In the spring of 1961
the New York office of a HUAC abolition group was broken into and vandalized.

On January 2, 1961, a group of members of the American Nazi Party descended
on Washington to picket the White House in support of HUAC. On the same day
a screaming, threatening mob of Fascist-oriented refugees besieged a meeting
in Washington's All Souls Unitarian Church held in support of a HUAC-
abolition campaign. The atmosphere was electric with imminent violence,
bloodshed was averted by prompt action of the police, who formed a protective
cordon around the meeting. When an outbreak seemed inevitable, the police
requested that the meeting be terminated as quickly as possible and supplied
a motorcycle escort to protect the participants on their way out of the city.
The picket signs of these fanatics were stored in Chairman Walter's office.

Two weeks later an inflamed champion of the Committee burst into the office
of University of California Professor Thomas F. Parkinson, poet, Guggenheim
fellow, author and teacher. The intruder carried a Bible in one hand and a
double-barreled shotgun in the other. He raised the gun and fired. The shots
ripped into the back of a graduate student, Stephen Mann Thomas, and brought
instant death. Professor Parkinson suffered a shattered jaw which required
skin grafting and plastic surgery,

The killer, John Harrison Farmer, was apprehended the next day. In his
briefcase was this note: "Death to all Communists. Death to all fellow
travellers. Death to every friend of Communism. Death in the name of God
to all the evil hosts of Communism and its followers." Farmer had also
marked for death Assistant Professor Richard T. Drinnon. Farmer did not
know these men. Both of them had opposed HUAC and were members of SLATE,
a campus anti-HUAC organization. He had read about their activity and was
particularly exercised by an article attacking Parkinson for his criticism
of the Committee.

When a Congressman votes against an appropriation measure for internal
improvement, he may get disapproving mail. But a vote in the House against
HUAC results in a shower of abuse, obscenity and hate. Many of these
letters are unprintable. Here are a few mild samples of congressional mail
after the 1961 vote on HUAC's appropriation:

Please, get yourself a one way ticket to Red Nazi Russia.

Drop dead. This would be the height of responsibility to this wonderful
Christian America.

You are sharing the objectives of the insidious and diabolical Communist
Conspiracy. Such flirtations with treason are gaining for you and the
despicable notoriety of being at the very least an unbalanced, soft headed,
bleeding heart. We, who now reverently treasure the memory of our Nathan
Hales, have a venomous contempt for you Benedict Arnold types.

This is the harvest of hate, and it dramatizes the role of the Committee
in the underworld of the professional hate groups.

Hate groups are established fixtures in American public life. Their
pathology has been frequently described by social scientists as an
expression of prejudice rooted in hate and defeat. They emerge in
response to a need for a scapegoat, an outlet for the aggression spawned
by frustration. Their world is one of black and white, of sweeping,
unalterable generalizations. To the bigot -- organized or unorganized --
the country is on the brink of disaster. He sees and invents evidences
of imminent doom everywhere. He is obsessed by the conviction that there
is one evil which explains all the ills of his society and of the world.
Salvation can come only by destroying, by liquidating or punishing his
"pet hate" -- be it Catholic, Negro, Jew or foreign-born.

The world of the hate group is structured on myth, stereotype and
falsehood. It protects itself from the inroads of reason with an
enormous arsenal of polemic and rhetorical weapons. The spokesman of
the hate group masterfully echoes all the paranoiac fears of his
followers and makes every challenge a confirmation of the power of the
enemy. He slanders, lies, exaggerates, evades and forges to keep alive
the particular terror on which his particular group feeds. The successful
merchant of hate develops a special fear-breeding vocabulary which oozes
contempt and aggression. He is a master of propaganda -- the more lurid
the better.

The bigot is drawn to the hate group out of an unrestrainable need for
action. He is not sustained by mere belief or conviction. He has a hunger
for direct action, for violence, born of a passionate resentment and
anger. Means, not ends, are all-iinportant to him. All our hate groups
are unified by a hazy nostalgia for a pure America, peopled by 100%
native-born, white Christian Americans and cleansed of the evils which,
to them, defile it. But they have no affirmative program beyond the goal
of destroying the objects of their hate. They are exclusively anti-Negro,
anti-Catholic, anti-labor, anti-Semitic, anti-foreign-born.

In addition to their special obsessions, the hate groups share an
enthusiasm for the political and social canons of the extreme right.
Thus they believe that America is not a democracy but a republic, that the
income tax should be abolished, foreign aid ended, States' rights restored
and the powers of the Supreme Court restricted. Inevitably, hate groups
have an affinity for one another, based on a consciousness of kind, common
emotional needs and interlocking prejudices. The White Citizens Councils
are anti-Negro but they are also anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic. The
American Council of Christian Churches is anti-liberal Protestant, but it
is also anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic. The Circuit Riders are anti-liberal
Protestant but also antiSemitic, anti-Negro and anti-labor.

Each hate group is thus naturally allied to all the others. All of them
have a common dedication which unites them in a special way; they are
fanatical crusaders for HUAC.

For the 23 years of its existence HUAC has had close and continuous ties
with the hate underworld and the more "respectable" pressure groups which
work with it. The Dies Committee's first investigator was Edward F.
Sullivan, a publicity specialist for native Fascist groups and a former
professional labor spy. Two years before his appointment he was the
principal speaker at an Asheville, North Carolina, convention of native
Fascists. (Sullivan's speech was described in the local press as "what
Hitler would have said had he been speaking.") He also was a prominent
speaker at Nazi Bund and Coughlinite gatherings. Another Committee
collaborator was Harry Jung, Chicago propagandist of anti-Semitism.
J. B. Matthews, the scholar of the patrioteer hate underworld, and Walter
S. Steele, one of its principal spokesmen, were pillars of the Dies
Committee. One of Dies's strongest admirers and collaborators was Joseph
P. Kamp, a professional hate merchant who was editor and publisher of a
Fascist magazine, The Awakener. Kamp's Constitutional Educational League
had a working relationship with the Committee. Kamp had access to the
Committee's files, in return for which he supplied the Committee with
thousands of names. The Educational League gave Dies an "Americanism"
award; it was subsequently mentioned in a Federal conspiracy indictment.

Dies enjoyed a similar relationship with Father Charles E. Coughlin,
Fascist priest, leader of the Christian Front. Through his radio program
and his publication, Social Justice, Father Coughlin disseminated
quantities of Nazi propaganda. He too provided Dies with lists of names
and propaganda material. In 1939 he issued these instructions to his
followers:

In your appreciation of the work accomplished by Dies employ some of
your leisure moments to write him a letter of encouragement. In fact,
a million letters brought to his desk would be an answer to those who
are bent on destroying him and the legislative body he represents.

Paid Nazi agents were enthusiastic about HUAC and its work. A banquet
for Dies was given by Fascist propagandist Merwin K. Hart in December 1939
(Mr. Hart, incidentally, was a contributor to Chairman Walter's most recent
congressional campaign. His National Economic Council was charged a few
years ago by the Buchanan Committee with "ill-concealed anti-Semitism.")
Among those who did honor to Dies were Bundist James Wheeler Hill, and
German-American Bund leader, Fritz Kuhn. When asked what he thought of the
Committee, Kuhn replied, "I am in favor of it being appointed again and I
want them to get more money." Convicted Nazi agent George Sylvester
Viereck said, "I have the highest respect for the Committee and sympathize
with its program." The Federal Communications Commission reported that
"Representative Dies received as many favorable references in Axis
propaganda in this country as any living American public figure." This
was during the war.

Dies shared speaking platforms with Fascist James True, inventor of a
special blackjack called the "kike-killer," and Reverend Edward Lodge
Curran, Father Coughlin's lieutenant. Under Dies, the Committee fed
material and articles by its members to Reverend Gerald B. Winrod's
Defender and Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith's Cross and the Flag, both anti-
Semitic hate sheets. Smith and Winrod showered Dies with praise -- as did
the entire hate underworld.

For example, William Dudley Pelley, the head of the pro-Nazi Silver Shirts,
said, "I formed the Silver Legion in 1933 . . . to propagandize exactly the
same principles." The Ku Klux Klan's Imperial Wizard, James Colescott,
asserted, "[The Committee's] program so closely parallels the program of
the Klan that there's no distinguishable difference between them." In 1942,
Imperial Wizard Colescott arranged a private interview with Dies which
resulted in his urging Klansmen everywhere "to support the work of the Dies
Committee." In the Klan's publication, The Fiery Cross, for January 1942,
he praised the Committee's "great service to our country."

It is hardly surprising that Representative Samuel Dickstein told the House
in 1941: "110 Fascist organizations in the United States have had, and have
now, the key to the back door of the Un-American Activities Committee."

Dies was under constant attack by liberal forces for his failure to
investigate Fascist organizations. But Dies used his powers to shield these
groups and made token investigations only to preserve the appearance of
impartiality.

These critics failed to appreciate the underlying realities of the Dies
Committee's relationship to the hate underworld. They had become partners
in a joint enterprise. The hate groups gave HUAC names, propaganda and
political support. HUAC used the power of the government to strike at the
hatists' targets. Then this material, fed into the Committee's files and
burnished with the prestige of officialdom, was used by the underworld in
its press. As David Wesley has summed it up:

What these long years did, was to create a solid establishment: an
acre of files, a thoroughly indoctrinated staff, a firm tradition,
a network of contacts and sources of information, a conditioned
pattern of behavior, a methodology, all intricately interwoven into
the whole fabric of the underworld of the peddlers of hate, with
its interlocking directorship and its broad, cross-pollinating
system of propaganda organs.

After HUAC was reconstituted in 1945, it continued its collaboration with
the hate groups. The Committee was dominated by Congressman John Rankin of
Mississippi, one of the most virulent anti- Semites ever to sit in Congress.
Rankin had been honored by the Nazis and did not hesitate to attack Jews and
Negroes as inferior peoples whenever he found an opportunity. On November 18,
1943, he announced that I.F. Stone, a Washington liberal journalist who had
attacked him for his anti-Semitism, was really named Isidore Feinstein. When
a group of women called on him to protest his bill denying the right of
franchise to all American soldiers, Mr. Rankin said of these ladies: "If I
am any judge, they are Communists, pure and simple, probably more simple
than pure. They looked like foreigners to me. I never saw such a wilderness
of noses in my life." Speaking on the floor of the House on February 21,
1944, he referred to Walter Winchell as "the communistic little kike."

In the first major debate on the new HUAC in the House, members of Congress
complained that HUAC was doing business at the same old stand. Representative
Hook of Michigan described the Committee as a "sounding board for the un-
American Fascist groups," and he informed the House that "Gerald L. K. Smith
[the notorious anti-Semite] is not only the Committee's adviser on un-
Americanism, he is also the confidante of the Committee's plans."
Representative Savage of Washington complained: "It seems to me all Gerald
L. K. Smith has to do is yell 'sic 'em' and the Committee's counsel takes
after whatever party Mr. Smith is peeved at." Representative O'Toole of New
York said: "The Committee has permitted itself to become a forum for the
dissemination of racial and religious theories that are not part of our
democracy."

The Wood-Rankin Committee's hate-group connections sparked a number of
investigations in the forties. One of the first was the attempt to purge the
radio of a group of liberal commentators who were critical of the hate groups.
In October 1945 the Committee obtained 78 scripts of radio commentators. In
December the Committee introduced a bill which would "by proper and frequent
announcements clearly separate and distinguish programs consisting of news
items from those programs based upon, or consisting of, personal opinion or
propaganda." On February 2, 1946, Rankin said, "I want to tell you now, some
of this stuff that is going over the air should be stopped. Of all the dirt
and filth I ever heard, those filthy attacks on me and the Committee on Un-
American Activities by Walter Winchell are the worst."

The Committee then turned its investigative talents to proving that the
United States is not a democracy -- the favorite thesis of the lunatic
fringe. Early in 1946 liberal organizations which had concerned themselves
with "democracy" were reminded in letters from Committee Counsel Adamson that
"this country was not organized as a democracy." Adamson wrote as follows to
columnist Drew Pearson: "Several people have called to my attention the
closing line of your Sunday night broadcast, 'Make democracy work.' I should
like very much to have your definition of the word 'democracy' as you are
using it over the radio. If you will be good enough to supply this
information, I will give the matter further consideration to determine
whether it should be called to the attention of the members of the committee
for such action as they deem proper."

The Hollywood probe of 1947 also had strong hatist links. The files on
Hollywood had been developed by Fascist publicist Edward F. Sullivan, and
the pressure for the investigation had come from an assortment of native
Fascists. Gerald L. K. Smith finally turned the trick. In 1948 he wrote in
The Cross and the Flag, "We do take credit, we Christian Nationalists, for
the recent investigation into Hollywood."

In 1949 HUAC made a sally into the field of education. It asked more than
100 schools and colleges to submit textbooks for a check on subversive
content. This probe, too, was inspired by a lunatic-fringe outfit, the
National Council for American Education, which was ran by the notorious
anti-Semite Allen A. Zoll. It boasted on its Board of Governors the
Coughlinite priest Edward Lodge Curran and a Committee member,
Representative (late Senator) Karl Mundt.

With the emergence of McCarthyism, HUAC was no longer limited to old-
fashioned hatist and crackpot sects for investigative suggestions and
support. Hate became everybody's business. The function of the private
organization in HUAC's operation continued to be important. It's principal
role was to act as HUAC's agent and collaborator in the hearings held to
expose HUAC's targets. The old-line professional hate groups together with
patriotic societies, reactionary fraternal orders, individual bigots and
patrioteers (the Network), undertook the punishment of HUAC's victims, a
perfect outlet for the aggressive action the hate group craves. The
primary weapons used against HUAC's victims are denunciation and discharge
pressures. The hatist adds to these his own special weapons: the anonymous
telephone call, the "crank" letter, boycott, vandalism and physical
violence. During the fifties, too, HUAC's dossiers and files -- the house
that hate groups built -- multiplied fantastically. The two-way flow of
names into the Committee and of "official" smears back to their hatist
source -- became a vast standardized operation. In addition, these files
were being stocked with names and propaganda from new sources: the FBI
files and ex-Communists. Every hate group was able to become a little
do-it-yourself HUAC. These groups, too, emerged as the major consumers
and distributors of HUAC propaganda, which they disseminated in millions
of copies. It costs them nothing and gives the cachet of official support
to their own programs. HUAC, on its part, is a national clearinghouse for
the merchandise of hate.

The Committee is not merely functionally linked to hate groups. Its own
operations reflect the hate-group syndrome. It is itself a hate group.
HUAC's extremism, its exaggerations, deceptions, and distortions, its
willful oversimplification of the complex, its division of the world into
black and white, its response to all forms of criticism with the Red smear,
its overheated, fear-mongering rhetoric, and its rivers of antidemocratic
propaganda, are the techniques and practices which have been made familiar
to us by the operations of the hate groups.

HUAC hates the "subversive" in much the same way that the anti-Semite hates
the Jew, the racist hates the Negro, the fundamentalist hates the Catholic,
the patrioteer hates the alien. But unlike its frequently frustrated non
governmental counterparts, HUAC can do something about its hate. It can give
direct expression to its hostility by punishing its object. What tells us
most clearly that HUAC is a hate group is the exposure system. Exposure
speaks the language of the hate group; it is hate in action.

All hate groups fantastically exaggerate the power of their enemies and
find everywhere frightening new proofs of their evil influence. This
formula is basic in HUAC's operations. HUAC has a great advantage over
other hate groups in its application of this formula, for HUAC's enemy is
undefined -- a "subversive" is whoever HUAC says is a subversive. The web
of subversion -- the "conspiracy" -- constantly expands to meet HUAC's
needs. When HUAC itself comes under attack, this technique is exploited to
heroic proportions. Since Communists oppose HUAC, all criticism of HUAC
becomes proof that (a) the critic is a Communist or a supporter, a dupe,
an ally, etc., and (b) the "conspiracy" is more powerful than ever for it
includes not only the "hardcore" Communists but the supporters, dupes,
allies, etc. Thus criticism of HUAC confirms the desperate need to
continue HUAC, for it alone can save us from this gigantic conspiratorial
octopus. HUAC naturally tries to bring its targets as close as possible
to the core of evil -- actual Party membership. To achieve this it has
developed a special logic of its own based on crudely strained inferences,
falsified proofs, and emotionally defined terms. The problem of
assimilating the non-Communist to the Communist is solved in a way which
has become HUAC's trademark: The use of guilt by parallelism, mutual
object and association. (An amusing current example is Chairman Walter's
charge that a newspaper story criticizing HUAC members' extravagance and
abuse of expense accounts "directly played into Communist hands.") As
HUAC applies and expands this formula it becomes clear that it regards
all of its opponents as subversive.

The John Birch Society Committee has also opened its welcoming arms to
another HUAC alumnus, ex-Congressman Kit Clardy. He, too, should find
its objectives and methods congenial. Clardy was a perennial rabble-
rouser who idolized Senator McCarthy. He was of the no-nonsense,
"let-me-at-'em" school of Red hunters.

When a lawyer once complained to Clardy that HUAC had been rough on his
clients, Clardy replied:

Pretty rough on those Communists? If we had been really rough on them
we would have taken them apart. As it was, we were treated in a way
that I think exhibited on their part the utmost contempt for the
Congress and their government, and they left the stand and lied like
horsethieves and we called them back and they took the fifth amendment
again. If I had my way and we had any power, they would really have
been punished by putting them in the dungeon the first time. . . . A
few years ago this committee had, and may have at the moment the right
to put witnesses down in the dungeon underneath the Capitol if they
refused to cooperate with the committee. Some day perhaps I will test
that out.

As far as the record shows, Clardy never did realize his dream of putting
witnesses in "the dungeon." But he did conduct hearings in May 1954 in his
home district, Flint, Michigan, in which he not only abused the witnesses
but incited violence against them. He recalled that during his college
days in 1937, his college mates had thrown UAWCIO organizers into the Red
Cedar River. He said: "I was proud of those kids. They should also have
tossed into the river the then Governor, the late Frank Murphy." Clardy's
conduct of the hearing contributed to the lynch spirit which swept the
city. A number of workers were dragged from their jobs in automobile
plants by lynch gangs and beaten; hostile witnesses were evicted from
their homes; their families had to go into hiding to escape the fury of
mob hoodlums; the office of the lawyer for the witnesses was smeared with
red paint.

Exposure: The Congressional Pillory

In 1951, Congressman Walter, presiding as a Committee member at Honolulu
hearings, made no secret of his hope that the "power of public opinion"
would implement the Committee's exposure of witnesses.

The exposure system is a concealed and, indeed, an unconstitutional form
of law enforcement; it has no place in a tripartite system of government
such as ours, which requires that each of the three coordinate branches
of government -- legislative, executive and judicial-respect the
integrity of the others.

Legislative power is concerned with the enactment of laws setting general
standards of conduct which apply to everyone. Investigations in aid of
the legislative power are directed at patterns of conduct, at behavior
which reflects a general condition, illuminating the need for a new law
or measuring the effectiveness of an existing law. An investigation --
a legislative investigation -- cannot be conducted for the purpose of
passing judgment on and determining the guilt of an individual. The
prosecution of individuals under duly enacted law is the exclusive
responsibility of the law-enforcement branch, which is part of the
executive department. The determination of guilt or innocence falls
exclusively within the province of the courts, which is the judicial
department. Or, to put it simply, one body makes the law, the second
carries out the law, the third judges guilt or innocence under that law.
Our governmental structure was erected on this tripartite underpinning,
not for reasons of symmetry or convenience, but because no better way
could be found to reconcile the use of governmental power with the
claims of individual freedom.

As John Adams noted in 1775:

A legislature, an executive, and a judicial power comprehend the
whole of what is meant and under stood by government. It is by
balancing each of these powers against the other two, that the
efforts in human nature toward tyranny can alone be checked and
restrained, and any freedom preserved in the Constitution.

The doctrine of the separation of powers was adopted by the
convention of 1787 not to promote efficiency but to preclude
the exercise of arbitrary power. The purpose was not to avoid
friction, but, by means of the inevitable friction incident to
the distribution of the governmental powers among three
departments, to save the people from autocracy.

The doctrine of separate and coordinate powers is a fundamental
precondition to the functioning of democratic government itself,
the means of preserving a system of checks and balances. Its
purpose is not merely to correct abuses of power in a particular
instance, but to discipline its exercise, to institutionalize
arrangements which will prevent abuse from arising in the first
place. Its integrity is the profound concern of all of us.

There are aspects of our Government which cannot be squared with
the separation-of-powers principle. For example, there is no
question that the executive veto power is a legislative function
and that the senatorial power to confirm appointments is an
executive one. The development of our administrative agencies has
imposed a considerable strain on this principle, for those bodies
exercise both executive and judicial functions. But their
activities are subject to judicial review to ensure that they do
not exceed their charters or violate individual rights.

Whatever modifications the principle of separation of powers has
suffered since the Constitution was framed, its basic substance
remains intact.

Throughout U. S. history, Congressional committees have occasionally
abused their power: they have investigated for nonlegislative ends,
to expose individuals for public condemnation or to act as a court
to try individuals. The hunt for headlines, political ambition, the
zealousness to benefit or injure a particular economic group, or to
influence the outcome of a labor dispute, the temptation to have a
fling as a prosecutor (many lawyer-Congressmen suffer from a "Mr.
District Attorney" complex) -- all of these, singly or in
combination, have led Congressional committees on occasion to depart
from legislative ends.

What must be emphasized here, however, is that, in contrast to the
occasional lapses of other committees, the UnAmerican Activities
Committee systematically and deliberately uses its powers for non-
legislative ends. Moreover, these nonlegislative ends are achieved not
in the context of a legitimate inquiry, but through an investigative
apparatus which is specially tailored to do one thing and one thing
alone -- injure the witness. Exposure is not the byproduct of the
Committee's hearings; it is the primary product -- the way in which
the Committee exercises its jurisdiction. It is not that the Committee
fails to comply with the rules of the game. It plays a different game
in a different ball park. HUAC has dedicated itself to the special and
unique function of exposure. Thus the Committee and its members have
openly and proudly dedicated themselves to the abuse of the power
vested in them by Congress. In 1947 the Committee explained that its
function was to "expose activities by un-American individuals and
organizations which, while sometimes being legal, are nonetheless
inimical to our American concepts and our American future.

In the same year, J. Parnell Thomas, then Chairman of the Committee,
proclaimed in a radio address:

The chief function of the Committee . . . has always been the exposure
of un-American individuals and their un-American activities. This is
based upon the conviction that the American public will not to
tolerate efforts to subvert or destroy the American system of
government, once such efforts have been pointed out. The Congress'
right to investigate and expose undemocratic forces is as
established and untrammeled as our Constitution.

This fine-sounding phrase merits examination. The citizen might
reasonably ask: Established by whom? And when? And obligingly, in 1951,
the Committee provided their answers in a publication distributed in
more than a million copies (100 Things You Should Know About Communism):
"Exposure in a systematic way began with the formation of the House
Committee on Un-American Activities. May 26, 1938 . . . with instruction
from the United States House of Representatives to expose people and
organizations attempting to destroy this country. That is still its job,
and to that job it sticks." There's that word "expose" again. Yet the
Congressional instruction to the Committee says nothing about "exposure"
-- this was merely Martin Dies' interpretation of the function of the
Committee.

Whatever may be the ultimate purpose of a bona fide legislative
investigation -- recommendations for new legislation, the appraisal of
a law already on the books, a check on the conduct of executive personnel
-- it centers on some problem, some issue, some evil: e.g., "payola," the
prizefight racket, the operation of the Port of New York Authority, the
high price of drugs. The need to throw factual light on "the matter under
inquiry," is all-important. It determines the nature of the evidence to
be sought, the kind of witnesses, the number, time, and place of hearings.
When the subject is exhausted, the investigation is over.

But HUAC has created for itself an inexhaustible subject. It can always
find "subversives" who must be exposed. The "issue" with which the
Committee is grappling is supposedly Communism. But the hearings held are
designed to shed light not on the issue, but on the witnesses. HUAC's
basic purpose is dual: first, publicly to identify the political
affiliations of the witness and his associates and, second, to punish
the witness because of those affiliations.

The identification itself is a serious interference with the rights of
free speech and association. To a far greater extent than is generally
acknowledged, our political and social freedoms are dependent on privacy
and anonymity.

The secrecy of the ballot, the confidential character of trade-union
membership, the assurance that subscribers will receive publications in
"plain brown wrappers" -- in these and in scores of other ways we
recognize that free association, thought and speech require privacy and
anonymity.

Indeed, free speech became possible only when the conditions of life
made anonymity possible. The right remained an abstraction in a pre-
industrialized society when each man was at the mercy of his neighbor's
prejudices and was bound to the mores, the religion and the politics of
his community. As Professor John P. Roche has written, "In a very real
sense the very impersonalization of urban life is a condition of
freedom; it is quite possible to live differently from one's neighbors
without their knowing, much less caring, about deviation." The right
to dissent on fundamental questions, proclaimed by the founders and
enshrined in the Constitution, is meaningless without anonymity.

The conformist pressures under which we live have made individual
speech so perilous that organizations arc indispensable to give dissent
strength and anonymity. But now it has become dangerous even to join
organizations. The Committee relentlessly seeks the identification
through "pitiless publicity" of members of organizations in order to
undermine our most meaningful freedom -- freedom of association.
Thousands might be willing to join the Committee for a Sane Nuclear
Policy (SANE) because they are convinced that nuclear testing is the
road to final incineration. But how many are ready to act in the face
of the fear that their names may be published by the Committee as
subversives and reprinted in the newspapers of their community?

The Committee's major achievement has been the transformation of the
hearing into a public identification device which destroys the privacy
essential to freedom. Because it strikes at the preconditions of
freedom, the ever-present threat of being dropped into the Committee's
goldfish bowl has been more stifling than all the repressive
legislation on the books.

The effectiveness of the Committee's use of the identification device
has shaped the basic strategy of modem repression. Compulsory disclosure
has emerged in our time as the most widely used and most effective form
of restraint on our basic freedoms. Senator Dodd insists that Dr. Linus
Pauling turn over to him the names of American scientists who assisted
him in circulating petitions in opposition to nuclear testing. New
Hampshire Attorney General Wyman sends Dr. Willard Uphaus to jail for
refusing to divulge the names of guests at the World Fellowship Camp.
A Florida legislative committee jails the Reverend Theodore R. Gibson
for his contempt of the committee in refusing to produce membership
lists of the NAACP. [Arkansas, Texas, Tennessee, Virginia, Georgia and
Louisiana have all tried to destroy the effectiveness of the NAACP by
requiring the disclosure of its membership lists.]

Effective advocacy of both public and private points of view, particularly
controversial ones, is undeniably enhanced by group association. . . . It is
hardly a novel perception that compelled disclosure of affiliation with
groups engaged in advocacy may constitute an effective restraint on
freedom of association. . . . [The] vital relationship between freedom to
associate and privacy in group association may in many circumstances be
indispensable to preservation of freedom of association, particularly
where a group espouses dissident beliefs.

The theories which justify identification and compelled disclosure
lured many liberals in the forties. "Stand up and be counted" became
the battle cry when the cold war touched off a drive for a means of
policing dissent which might not collide with constitutional guarantees.
Disclosure was widely touted as a needed counterpart to the labeling
requirements of the Pure Food and Drug Act. The provisions of the
Securities and Exchange Act for public registration of stock issues
gave rise to proposals for an "SEC of ideas." These theories have been
murdered by the realities. The supporters of these theories exaggerated
the need to protect the "consumer" of ideas from deception and ignored
the key relationship of privacy to freedom. In addition, they failed to
recognize that disclosure of dissenting opinions would inevitably lead
to reprisal and punishment by hostile forces in the community.

Nor did they foresee that the requirement that a person disclose
his own present or past political affiliations can easily lead to a
requirement that he identify others -- and become an informer.

The invasion of the privacy of the witness and the restraint upon his
freedom of association are just the downpayment on the full damage which
the Committee does to him. The hearing is intended to destroy him as a
person, to violate his dignity by forcing him to confess his political
"sins," and to deprive him of his livelihood. This is the Committee's
punishment for his offense of being, not even a proven, but a suspected
"subversive" -- not by any means only a Communist, or an ex-Communist,
but anyone whom HUAC expediently chooses to consider "subversive,"
whether it be because of affiliation with the NAACP, or the National
Council of Churches, or SANE, or any other organization which falls
under its disapproval. The witness has violated no law; he has merely
declined to answer the "Sixty-four dollar question," ("Are you now or
have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?") on the basis of
a constitutional amendment -- usually the Fifth Amendment -- privilege
against self-incrimination. This plea, as the Supreme Court has
repeatedly ruled, cannot give rise to an inference of guilt. Moreover,
even if the witness had been a Communist Party member, such membership
is itself an exercise of constitutionally protected rights of free
speech and association. The exposure process seeks to brand its victim
as subversive for the rest of his life on the public record, a visible
continuing target for hostility and reprisal. The goal is to make the
unfriendly witness permanently unemployable by attaching to him an
indelible stigma -- democracy's counterpart of the yellow armbands
which Hitler forced on the Jews.

The exposure punishment is actually closer to us than Hitler's Germany.
We are dealing here with a latter-day version of the pillory and stocks,
the devices used in the 17th and 18th centuries to hold offenders on
exhibition in a public place, in an uncomfortable and degrading posture.
These archaic instruments physically punished and humiliated the
offender, and at the same time exhibited him as a warning to others.
Most importantly, the pillory held a man helpless in its grasp as fair
game for the community; it was intended that he be spat upon, cursed,
taunted and stoned. The pillory was used -- especially in the 17th
century -- to punish dissenters.

It is no mean achievement to engineer the punishment of an American for
nothing more than resorting to rights protected by his Constitution. To
ensure the destruction of the witness, the hearing is carefully staged
to reach and inflame, through the press, radio and television, a wide
audience beyond the hearing room: the community at large, employers, bar
associations, local police authorities, boards of education. The exposure
hearing Is a highly efficient weapon. Professor Daniel Pollitt, studying
the results of two years of hearings, showed that of 64 unfriendly
witnesses appearing before the Committee on whom information was
available, 50 lost their jobs.

The knife of exposure sometimes cuts too deeply and wounds even the
cooperative witness. Justice Black, in the Barenblatt case, pointed out
that: "Even those the committee does not wish to injure are often hurt
by its tactics, so all-pervasive is the effect of its investigations."

When the individual's privacy is invaded on the witness stand, the shield
of urbanization and large-scale industry is transformed into a sword. A
powerful press rubs the community's and the employer's noses in the
disclosure. The likelihood is strong that the victim is a stranger to
his neighbors, without protection against their suspicions. The giant
size of our employing units, their interrelatedness and close ties to
the defense establishment, make it easy for the Committee to hound the
unfriendly witness out of employment in an industry. In a highly
integrated society, the victim has no place to hide, no economic or
geographic haven of tolerance. By the early fifties, many powerful
employers (General Electric, Westinghouse, R.C.A., Bethlehem Steel,
U.S. Steel, to name only a very few), and indeed, whole industries,
proclaimed a new ground for automatic discharge or suspension -- being
an uncooperative witness, or a variant thereof.

In the professions, the Committee struck a gusher. Long-established
tenure protections were uprooted overnight as boards of education made
noncooperation with congressional committees a ground for termination.
Many American universities, the United Nations, newspapers, symphony
orchestras, private schools, social agencies and research organizations
adopted the same policy.

It is charged that there are still 200 writers and performers who are
blacklisted in Hollywood as a result of the operation of the exposure
system. With the exception of a few New York Times reporters, almost
all other journalists who were exposed by the Committee or its Senate
counterpart were fired.

There are even a number of states which during the fifties denied
unemployment benefits to those discharged for being uncooperative
witnesses (Maryland, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts). In some states
an unfriendly witness cannot obtain a license to sell liquor, tend bar
or perform as a wrestler. The District of Columbia will not permit an
unfriendly witness to tune pianos. And the Network once forced the
cancellation of a chess tournament in Baltimore because a leading
contender was an unfriendly witness.

The victims of the old-time pillory sank or swam on the tide of
community judgment; thus the pillory of popular dissenters such as
Daniel Defoe and John Lilburne was made the occasion for public
triumphs in their honor; but Titus Oates, the notorious informer,
emerged half-dead from the pillory. The Committee cannot afford to
leave the fate of its victims to chance.

For all of the fear-mongering stagecraft of the bearing, there remains
the possibility that the exposure will not "take." The Committee needs
some representatives in the community who will make sure that all goes
well in its absence. To this end, it has perfected a system of
collaboration with the Network of rightist organizations which I have
already referred to. Among the most prominent of these are: the
American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, AWARE, Inc., the
Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, the Daughters of the American
Revolution, and the American Council of Christian Churches. In
addition, the Network includes scores of individuals and ad hoc
organizations which spring up in connection with particular hearings.

The Committee's organization Network serves a variety of functions.
Its members get access to the Committee's files and dossiers for the
low-down on local suspects. Network members are instrumental in bringing
the Committee to their communities. They are the beaters and the advance
men for the hearing and drum up favorable publicity. At the hearing,
special seats are reserved for them.

But the Network members are more than supporters and well-wishers.
They act as the Committee's agents and do for it what it cannot do for
itself. The Committee cannot officially require public or private
employers to discharge the unfriendly witness -- although it frequently
comes pretty close to doing so anyway. For such open pressures would
fatally discredit its claim that the hearing is merely a legislative
investigation. The Network enables the Committee to ensure the injury
of the witness and at the same time to avoid legal responsibility for
it. To make it easier to force the witness out of employment, the
Committee publishes his name over and over again, first in a special
index to its public hearings, then in its annual report, and again in
a huge cumulative index.

Members of the Network visit the local newspapers to develop pressure
on employers. They personally write, call and visit private and public
employers. They organize the forced removal of unfriendly witnesses
from shops -- "run outs," as they are called. They circulate copies of
the hearings, write letters to the newspapers demanding the discharge
of the unfriendly witnesses, pack board of education meetings called
to discuss the fate of the teachers who were unfriendly witnesses, and
organize telephone campaigns to force sponsors to fire performers and
writers. The dynamics of this partnership between a public agency and
private power groups was put forth with striking candor by Representative
Walter before he became Chairman of HUAC:

Rep. Francis Walter (D. Pa.) who will take charge in the new Congress
of House activities against Communists and their sympathizers, has a
new plan for driving Reds out of important industries. He said today
he plans to hold large public hearings in industrial communities
where subversives are known to be operating, and to give known or
suspected commies a chance in a full glare of publicity to deny or
affirm their connection with a revolutionary conspiracy -- or to take
shelter behind constitutional amendments.

"By this means," he said, "active Communists will be exposed before their
neighbors and fellow workers, and I have every confidence that the loyal
Americans who work with them will do the rest of the job."

How Exposure Works

Exposure is not simply a process of identifying a witness as a subversive
at a public hearing. It might be difficult to engineer the punishment of
the witness merely for exercising his constitutional rights, Careful
preparation is needed so that the identification is made in an atmosphere
of pervasive hostility; fear must rule people's thoughts and drive out
reason so that Network groups can call the turn the Committee wants called.

The Committee strives to inflame the community to destroy the subversive
and, in the process, to discredit and attack all kinds of liberal causes
and activities. The exposure system produces a planned political overkill.

The community movement which HUAC shapes to destroy the exposed witness
spreads like a brush fire. A Committee hearing, if properly planned, can
influence the decision in a local tax issue, kill a housing referendum,
defeat slates in trade unions, PTA's and cooperative elections, blast
the hopes of a candidate for Congress or a local council, reduce
participation in a community forum, force a change in the school
superintendent, remove books from library shelves, and plunge the
community into a miasma of suspicion, hate and fear.

The news of the hearing slowly seeps into the community. A HUAC investigator
visits a potential witness at home and asks him to cooperate. He is warned
that a refusal might lead to loss of job, or (in the case of a naturalized
citizen) to denaturalization. If the potential witness remains hostile, he
is visited at his job. The employer is requested to make the employee see
the light.

When the roster of witnesses is complete, an alert goes out to security
officers of corporations, boards of education, local politicos and other
interested individuals. The Committee frequently works with a local
journalistic tout who gives its investigators tips on suspects. In
exchange, he is permitted to break the story, "Red Probe Due in February";
"Committee Investigators Gather Evidence"; "Commie Probe to Call 40,
Express Learn!" The story quotes a "reliable Committee source" that HUAC
has uncovered a serious threat to the community's security.

By now gossip and rumor fill the air with the names of the victims. Some
of them are called in by their employers for "quiet talks." The special
hum that fear makes -- of loss of job, of injury to family and career --
becomes louder. There are anxious telephone calls -- has a stranger
appeared with a piece of paper, a subpoena? HUAC's supporters are
mobilizing. The community is still passive, but curious -- waiting for
the next development.

While stoutly insisting that it is a firm policy not to release the names
of those subpoenaed, HUAC ("a source close to the Committee") frequently
leaks the names to the press. The announcement of the subpoena in advance
of the bearing makes it easy to develop discharge pressures. The local
vigilantes ride harder. Resolutions are passed; trials are held; balls
are closed; shrill-voiced patriots call employers, school boards, and
professional societies to put them on the spot about subpoenaed employees
and members.

At last the subpoenas are actually served -- usually about a month before
the hearing. Now the Committee issues a press release. It frequently
promises sensational disclosures of some particularly grave peril which
will be aired at the hearing ("Probers Fear Port Menaced"; "Defense Area
Declared Infiltrated"; "Sabotage Threat to Be Probed by House Committee").
As the hearing day approaches, the press goes into action with
"background" stories ("Red-Led Unions Here Overdue for Probe"; "Teachers
Cell Ten Years Old"). When the tempo lags, "dope" stories (inside advance
information) appear about the unfriendly witnesses ("Area Salesman to Be
Called by Probe"; "Six Defense Workers Subpoenaed").

By the time the hearing opens, the normally passive anti-Communist
members of the community have been gulled into believing they are
genuinely threatened, while the community Network is riding high on a
tide of vociferous hostility. The press waits to cash in on the scare
headlines it has, been running, expectant citizens await with alarm
the disclosure of information that menaces their community; unfriendly
witnesses, anticipating the rack for weeks, reach a crescendo of anxiety.
The cry of "Communist!" has been made to echo the panic of an insidious
disease once proclaimed by another cry, "Unclean!" The climate of fear
is prepared, the stage set.

In the typical case, the person who is served with a subpoena knows he
has been singled out for public exposure. Sometimes he is summoned to
a private, executive session. He hopes that the private session will
shield him from further harassment. But if he refuses to answer in
executive session, he is called for a public appearance.

Here is the statement of a witness who appeared at an open hearing, in
November 1959, purportedly dealing with subversion among Puerto Ricans
in the continental United States and their homeland:

A representative of this committee first approached me in December
of 1957 and I was interviewed by him in my office. On November 3, 1958,
almost a year later, two representatives of the committee, Mr. Williams
and Mr. Gerhard, visited me at my home in New York City. At this time
these representatives noted that my graduate studies as a candidate for
Doctor of Philosophy were nearing completion. They suggested that I had
a promising career ahead as a scientist and that it would be a pity to
ruin my career before it was even started. They stated that if I did
not provide them with the information they requested, I would be served
with a subpoena by the committee. They stated that if I refused to
testify and invoked the protection of the Fifth Amendment the consequent
publicity would result in reprisal by persons outside the committee who
disapproved of witnesses invoking the Fifth Amendment. They reminded me
that other careers had been rained by such exposure. They stated they
had delayed service of the subpoena in the hopes of eliciting
cooperation. At the end of the interview, when they decided they bad
been wasting their time, they announced that a subpoena would be
forthcoming and commented, "Let the chips fall where they way."

I appeared before the committee in executive session on August 6,
1959. At that time I declined to answer questions concerning my past or
present political associations and personal affairs. I was continued
under subpoena until today. I can only conclude that my summons to this
open hearing is an attempt to make good the threats to carry out this
punitive action. It would seem that the broken careers that have been
left behind by the committee are not an unfortunate by-product of
information-gathering for legislative purposes, but rather a primary
purpose of the hearings.

Torn between his fears and his principles, the unfriendly witness is
plunged into an agonizing crisis. He knows that the Committee demands
his physical presence in the hearing room for no reason other than to
make him a target of its hostility, to have him photographed, exhibited
and branded.

Life in a emocracy has not taught him how to cope with these attacks.
He knows that the vandalism, ostracism, insults, crank calls, and hate
letters that he and his family have already suffered are but the
opening stages of a continuing ordeal to which he is to be relentlessly
subjected. He knows that he may lose his job -- if he hasn't already
lost it -- and that his family faces a kind of community outlawry. Most
of all, he is tormented by the awareness that he is being punished
without valid cause, and deprived, by manipulated prejudice, of his
fundamental rights as an American and of the moral and ethical
protections which a civilized society extends to every man. He is
sickened by the realization that an agency of Government has pandered
to the bigotry of the community and now proposes to make his personal
life a prey of that bigotry.

He must choose a lawyer (and pay him a fee). If he is still employed,
he must explain to his employer that he will be away from work -- and
why. If the hearing is out of town, he may lose several days' work
(and incur extra legal fees and expenses). Will the witness' wife
share his feelings? (A blacklisted witness, Alvah Bessie, has written,
"Personally, I know of at least fifteen broken marriages broken because
husband or wife became an informer or refused to. . . .") Shall he tell
his coworkers about the subpoena? Will they understand? Or should he
pray that the story of his appearance will be buried on the back
pages? His youngsters have been taunted, shoved off the sidewalks and
spat upon. What about the children's school? Should the teacher or
principal be spoken to? Should he consult the minister?

As he approaches the hearing, the fear, the sense of shock, intensifies.
A subpoenaed person, interviewed in the course of The Fund for the
Republic's investigation of blacklisting, describes it this way:

Even though you know what takes place in that committee, you are so
accustomed to respecting government in all its forms, that your fear
is enormous. Intellectually, you understand what's happening, but you
can't control the fear. An insidious form of selfguilt sets in. You
accept the views of the committee in spite of yourself. It's quite
bewildering. Afterwards, you find yourself guarded and evasive whatever
you do, wherever you go.

While the Committee likes to see the unfriendly witness exposed and
destroyed by publicity even before the hearing, it is careful to shield
the identity of the friendly witness, especially if his name and role
have never before been disclosed. These witnesses are frequently issued
subpoenas as though they were unfriendly. The Committee will not identify
them before the hearing because, it says, they might be assassinated or
their families injured by the bloodthirsty Reds. Besides, this heightens
the discomfiture of surprise, the drama of confrontation, and minimizes
the possibility of cold feet, second thoughts, or the development of
discrediting material (always a danger with an informer) which might
dampen community enthusiasm.

Moreover, it is important for the friendly witness to share the
confidence of the unfriendly witnesses until the hearing so that he can
testify about the hostility with which the unfriendly witnesses responded
to the Committee, the steps they planned to resist it, and the advice
that they received from their lawyers -- something that might be
difficult if the friendly witness were not subpoenaed and impossible if
his "friendly" status were disclosed. In the 1959 Pittsburgh hearings,
the Committee, with great relish, elicited testimony from a friendly
informer about the reaction of the unfriendly witnesses to the hearing,
and how, armed with his own subpoena, he penetrated their meetings with
counsel and, masquerading as an unfriendly witness, shared in the legal
advice that they received -- a tactic which outraged even the Pittsburgh
press.

Ile public hearings throb with hostility. When the hearing is held on
the road, the Committee arranges in advance to pack the room with its
Network supporters. The 1954 Seattle hearing was so jammed with members
of the American Legion Auxiliary and Pro-America that many of the
witnesses and their lawyers had difficulty getting into the bearing
room. The friendly witnesses are separated from the unfriendly ones and
are usually seated in an enclosure reserved for the Committee itself,
members of the United States Attorney's office, the FBI, employers and
members of the local antisubversive squad. When the hearing is held in
Washington, similar efforts are made to ensure a hostile audience. At
the 1953 Wasbington bearing of Reverend Jack E. McMichael, the best
seats in the hearing room were reserved for members of the Circuit
Riders, a reactionary religious group which shares the Committee's
views. Each seat was lined in advance with copies of its literature.

When the hearing begins, the Chairman of the subcommittee conducting
the bearings makes a statement in which he freshens up the fears of the
audience and inspires them to finish off the unfriendly witnesses. The
Reds are more menacing than ever; their machinations are more diabolical;
do not be deceived by the number of individuals who have left the
Communist Party; these are sinister tactics to screen a revolutionary
plot, etc.

After this ritualistic denunciation, there follows a special local
appeal. Chairman Velde's opening gambit in the 1954 Seattle-Portland
hearing Is a classic example of the genre:

There is probably no section In the United States that possesses a
more strategic importance than this area. We members of Congress
recognize this fact, and, unfortunately, so have enemies of this
country.

In the Committee's world it is always high noon -- there are no
unstrategic areas, every industry is the most vital to our defense and
every example of subversion the most devilish it has ever encountered.

Sometimes the need to make a good first headline for the afternoon press
will drive the Committee into particu larly silly charges. In July 1959,
the Committee opened hearings on "Communist Training Operations" with an
announcement by Chairman Walter that one of the witnesses had "received
orders from the Kremlin, which have now been transmitted to the comrades
in the United States. . . . to intensify the training of key revolutionaries
in sabotage, subversion and penetration." There was not a word of evidence
adduced in the hearing to support this charge, but it was good for a
headline: REDS STEP UP SABOTAGE WALTER SAYS.

When the informer takes the stand, even Arens can do very little to
recreate the mingled sense of fear, awe and excitement which his
revelations produced in an earlier day. But Arens does his best to
invest the performance with melodrama and menace. After the preliminaries
are disposed of, the Committee gets to the heart of the matter-the
listing of names. The Committee already has the names, but it wants them
on the public record. For example (Communications, 1957):

Mr. Arens: Now during the course of your membership in the Communist
Party did you know a number of people as Communists who were engaged in
the communications field?

Mrs. Greenberg: I did.

Mr. Arens: Do you have before you now a list of names of persons that
you have given to the staff here, persons known by you to a certainty
to have been members of the Communist Party?

Mrs. Greenberg: I have.

Mr. Arens: As to each of these persons, have you. observed him or her i
n a closed Communist Party meeting?

Mrs. Greenberg: I have.

Mr. Arens: Would you kindly tell us the names of each of these persons,
and give us just a word of description concerning each one of them?

The witness then proceeded to list the names previously given to the
Committee. If the witness forgets a name, he is prompted (New England,
1958):

Mr. Arens. May I make the record clear here? The names which I have,
from time to time, been prompting your memory with and suggestions are,
in each and every instance, names which you have heretofore given us?

Mr. Penha: That is absolutely correct.

Mr. Arens: In private sessions, is that correct? Now may I suggest
the name of the witness then characterizes the political position and
importance of each person named. In most instances, the victims turn out
to be of the leadership elite. There are few unimportant Communists in
the informer's world. Hearings, rarely fail to turn up a headline:
WITNESS NAMES NO. 1 RED IN AREA PROBE.

When the informer leaves the stand, he is held in reserve for
confrontations and for spot appearances.

It must be remembered that the subpoena and the Committee appearance
is only one path to the Committee's goal of exposing and ruining its
victims.

As the friendly witness recites the list of names, each one described
and the spelling verified, when necessary, to pinpoint the victim,
newspaper reporters relay their stories of the disclosures. At once the
machinery that worked on subpoenaed witnesses now goes to work on people
who have merely been named. The named victim's phone rings; the press is
calling for a statement. Discharge and trouble strike; the entire
community becomes an exposure mill. The next edition carries as front-
page news the list of those named-with photographs when they are
available. Stores and homes are picketed, calls to boards of education
are made, boycotts are threatened, blacklists are imposed, emergency
meetings are called. The named victims can be exposed and ruined on a
wholesale scale without a subpoena or an appearance -- simply on the
testimony of an informer.

The following recital by a named, and subsequently subpoenaed, doctor
tells it own tale.

On September 21, while you were questioning a doctor, you asked him
whether there was a certain type of meeting in my home, and you mentioned
my name twice, and you spelled out my name to make sure that everybody
got it, and the following day at 10 o'clock in the morning the
superintendent of the hospital asked me to resign because of the
associated publicity. This, mind you, after seven and one-half years of
excellent service, admitted by the superintendent of the hospital.

The meeting referred to was a "meeting of the medical division of the
Arts, Sciences and Professions." Finally, the dreaded moment arrives.
The subpoenaed unfriendly witness, named by the friendly witness who
has just left the stand, is called to testify. The Committee moves in
to complete the exposure; members of the FBI staff and local Red squad
look him over as he moves toward the witness stand to fix his face in
their minds. He is overborne and bewildered by the naked hostility of
the governmental forces confronting him.

The picture which the Committee presents is as harsh as it is false.
The Government of the United States, in the persons of members of the
Committee, panoplied by its staff, United States marshals and friendly
witnesses, has trapped an enemy of the Nation, lurking and plotting in
his community and place of employment, and is bringing him to book. The
Committee members sit high on the judges' seats of the local courthouse
(where field hearings are usually conducted), or on the dais of the
august caucus room in the old House Office Building in Washington. The
witness proceeds to a table below with a gagged counsel at his side, to
be judged and punished at the same time. And this highly direct use of
power is as arbitrary as it is harsh, for it is unredeemed by any of
the procedural decencies of the Anglo-American legal system.

The witness makes his way to the stand, amidst the popping of flash
bulbs, the grinding of television, the clicking of stiff cameras, and
the bustle at the press table. His lawyer complains of the unnecessary
bedlam and requests that the cameras be halted and the televising
cease. The Committee solemnly explains that it has no jurisdiction --
and this frequently in a Federal courthouse -- over the photographers
or television cameramen until after the witness is sworn. This reason
for evading Speaker Rayburn's ban on the televising of all committee
hearings is akin to a claim that the Committee would be powerless
before a witness is sworn to prevent a spectator from smoking or
brawling at the place where it is conducting a hearing.

Moreover, the cameramen know very well that the Committee really does
not intend that they cease photographing or televising the witness
during his testimony. They usually continue while the witness or counsel
protests in vain. For example, in the 1958 New England hearings the
Chairman ruled at the request of a witness that "no pictures will be
taken during the course of the testimony. . . ." The photographers
persisted after she took the stand. She protested, "The photographers
are getting me very nervous, Mr. Chairman." Her counsel added, "I
thought the pictures were not to be taken, according to your own
ruling." For this simple reminder, counsel was rebuked for "taking
this opportunity to make speeches."

When the cameras continued, the witness pleaded, "Please I am very
nervous when the pictures are taken. Please, I ask that no pictures
be taken." The Committee, still declining to enforce its own ban on
photographers, told the witness, "If you would answer the question
you would not be so nervous." There followed an attempt to terrorize
the witness into answering with the help of the grinding cameras.
Another request to halt the televising ("I want to call your
attention that you are still permitting the cameras to go after you
already said they would not"), was ignored as the Committee pressed
harder and threatened contempt. The witness again protested, "Mr.
Chairman, the photographers are still taking pictures here" and they
continued to do so until the witness left the stand.

While objections to photographers are frequently futile, a failure
to object sometimes brings the taunt that the witness is avid for
publicity. In a recent hearing in Chicago, a 70-year-old witness
who had been hospitalized with a heart attack asked the Committee
to consider his age and health in its interrogation. When his
counsel said that there was no objection to the photographers,
Congressman Scherer sneered, "You don't think that would hurt his
heart condition?"

As in a slaughterhouse, nothing in an exposure hearing is wasted.
The very first questions asked (residence, occupation, place of work)
are all designed to contribute to the witness' ruin. The Committee
knows where the witness works, but how can the Committee be sure that
a witness will lose his job if the nature and place of his employment
are not put on the record? Similarly, the public identification of
the witness' home address, which the Committee also knows, is
indispensable if his neighbors are to be reached. Matters such as
these could hardly be left to chance.

The Committee invariably threatens contempt against witnesses who
refuse to answer such questions. Even when the witness pleads with
the Committee that previous disclosures have resulted in molestation,
it does not relent.

Mr. Moulder: Where is your office located from which you engage in
the practice of law?

Witness: In the City of Los Angeles.

Mr. Moulder: In what building and office number?

Witness: Does that have any pertinency?

Mr. Moulder: To properly identify you as to who you are. We are trying
to designate as to just exactly who you are.

Witness: I believe it is in the telegram as correctly stated here, Mr.
Moulder. That is the telegram which I received summoning me to this
postponed hearing.

Mr. Moulder: Then do you refuse to answer that question?

Witness: Well, my address, as I say, is correctly stated in the
telegram. I believe you have a copy.

The witness answered the question.

In the 1959 Los Angeles hearings, the Committee tried to force a
witness to state whether he was a doctor or a dentist and to give
his street address. He gave his address as "Los Angeles County." But
this did not satisfy the Committee. First Committee Counsel Tavenner
tried to justify extracting his address from him on the ground that
it was necessary "to locate him geographically so as to be able to
know what his opportunities are for knowledge of Communist activities"
in the particular area under investigation. Congressman Jackson
suddenly sprouted a concern that the Committee might be confused.
There was, he claimed, another individual with the same name; the
residence was important to eliminate the possibility "of confusion
with another doctor with the same name."

The doctor's lawyer unsuccessfully tried to offer this information
off the record. The Committee wanted it on the record. To satisfy
both. Tavenner and Jackson, the witness specified the area of the
county where he lived.

Throwing pretense to the winds, the Committee demanded, "Where, what
address, that is a very general area." The witness then gave his
street number. Surely there could not be two doctors with the same
name, living in the same area, and at the same street number. But
the Committee closed in on him: "What city?" "Well," continued Mr.
Tavenner "it has been a long time finding that out. Where do you
maintain your office?" The witness' lawyer, again to spare his
client harassment, offered to supply this data off the record. When
the Committee refused, the witness pleaded the Fifth Amendment.

In the Newark hearing held in September 1958, a witness resisted
giving his residence and occupation because he had appeared in
executive session where he had already given the Committee answers
to these questions. He lost his job.

A witness (Youngstown, 1956) is asked to state her occupation. She
answers, "If I state my occupation, I will be fired. I prefer to
withold that."

Mr. Arens: You are required to state your occupation. . . . I
respectfully request that the witness be ordered and directed to
answer the question.

Witness: I am a social worker.

Mr. Arens: And you work where?

Witness: I expect if I made public where I work, that I will be
fired. I hope that I do not have to make public that information.

Mr. Arens: Maybe it would be in the public interest if we would
divulge where you work. . . .

Mr. Willis and Mr. Velde assure the witness that she will not lose
her job, if she answers the questions.

Mr. Arens: What do you do at the place where you are employed?

Witness: I am a social worker.

Mr. Arens: And what do you do where you are employed?

Witness: I do the usual duties of a social worker.

Mr. Arens: And among whom do you work?

The witness again begs the Committee not to force her out of her job.
Let's start on another question, Mr. Arens suggests, and then we will
return to your job. "Are you a Communist?" When the witness declines
to answer on constitutional grounds, Arens again insists, "Now tell
the Committee where you work."

Again the witness appeals to the Committee not to take away her job.
Arens offers her another bargain: If the Committee doesn't require
an answer to the employment question, will she talk about other
organizations. She is asked about those and again about the Communist
Party. The witness declines to answer on constitutional grounds.

Mr. Arens: Now we are back where we started from. Tell us where you
work.

Witness: Your Honor, I am a social worker for a private social agency.

Mr. Arens: And what is the name of that private social agency?

Witness: As I said, if I give the name, I will certainly be fired.

Mr. Arens: Did you have a discussion with your employers respecting
your membership in the Communist Party when you accepted this
position with this private social agency?

This last question is the standard question used to cue the employer
to fire a witness and at the same time to supply a reason for the
discharge. Arens was beginning to weary of the cat-and-mouse game he
was playing with the witness, for in his next question he indicated
that he knew all along where she was employed, and worked in the
"brainwashing" theme.

Do you think your losing your job might be because the parents of
the children that you influence in Communism, try to influence in
Communism, protest a little bit if they knew they had a Communist
on the grounds? Do you think that is what might be in the back of
your mind?

After taunting the witness a little more and permitting her to
thrash about as the net was being drawn tighter, Arens asked, "Are
you presently employed at the Jenny E. Clarkson Home for Girls at
Valhalla, N.Y.?" But it was not enough for Arens to torment the
witness; first, by seeking to use economic pressure to force her to
surrender her constitutional rights; second, pretending that the
Committee did not know where she worked and needed to know for a
legitimate reason; third, by suggesting without any factual warrant
at all that she deserved to lose her job because she had abused her
relationship to her charges; and fourth, by naming her employer
after the witness had made it clear that such a disclosure would
result in discharge. When she repeated that the disclosure of her
employment was "unfair" and "unfortunate" and would injure her,
Arens baited her in a new way: "You didn't lose your employment
with the Western Pennsylvania Committee for Protection of Foreign
Born because somebody said something bad about you, did you? . . .
You didn't lose your job as executive secretary of the Civil
Rights Congress in Pennsylvania because someone said something bad
about you, did you? . . . Did the Communist Party ever deprive you
of a job?"

After another try at the "brainwashing" theme ("how old are these
girls? . . . how many are there in the home?"). Arens tried a new
gambit and asked the witness to identify her name on a Daily Worker
wrapper: "We are going to give you an opportunity now to make your
employer proud of you, and these little girls proud, that you are
here serving your country, telling us all about the conspiratorial
apparatus that would destroy this country. Just tell us if you are
she. Perhaps you receive the Daily Worker to use it in uncovering
other Communists or something. We receive it in our work all the
time."

The Committee's tactics succeeded --the witness lost her job.

What conceivable relationship does this inquisitorial savagery
bear to the process of gathering facts to help Congress discharge
its legislative responsibilities? The hate, the drive of almost
pathological intensity to wound and hurt which breaks through the
records of this (and so many other) hearings, echoes with chilling
fidelity the grillings of Jews by the Nazis -- before worse came.
To bring the matter closer to home: where could one find a more
vivid counterpart to the 17th century arraignment and trial of a
witch?

It should be more than clear by now that the hearing is not a
legislative investigation at all, but an inquisition. The initial
question about the witness' residence and occupation are not mere
formalities to identify him in a preliminary way, but dodges in a
game of exposure.

These tactics are used solely because the witness is unfriendly.
The witness can escape this grilling simply by becoming friendly.
For example, if the witness does not want to give his address or
his occupation, he can indicate his readiness to cooperate. ("You
do not want to give your street address? There is no necessity for
giving your street address.") In one instance, after being asked
if he were a member of the Communist Party, and before answering,
a witness requested the removal of the camera. Chairman Velde
replied:

Well, now, may I ask the witness this: If I do order -- or if the
committee does order -- the cameras turned off and the lights
turned off, would the witness then answer the questions put to
him by the counsel?

Witness: Well, I would feel more at case.

Mr. Velde: Well, would you answer the question as to your membership
in the Communist Party if the lights were turned off and the
television and newsreel cameras ordered to desist? Would you then be
willing to cooperate with the committee in that regard?

The heart of the hearing-the $64 question, "Are you now or have you
ever been a member of the Communist Party?" and its variations --
have no investigative meaning or purpose. The Committee's claim that
this question is not a destination, but a journey to the facts, a
"preliminary question," is a deception. The absurdity of the claim
that the $64 question is asked as a matter of unavoidable necessity
to establish the witness' qualification to report the facts which
alone interest HUAC is best demonstrated by the savagely accusatory
character of the "questioning" of the witness about his politics.

It is not Arens' style just to ask the witness the $64 question and
let it go at that. He, has perfected a ripe antisubversive baroque,
so freighted with prejudicial rhetoric that a failure to respond
will yield a maximum of exposure value. Arens asks a witness if "he
is now or has ever been a member of a Godless conspiracy based on
perversion and deceit," if he is a member of the "army of the Kremlin
steeled to overthrow our institutions and operating behind a facade
of humanitarianism," if he is part of a Kremlin-controlled world
Communist operation aimed at the nerve centers of our Nation." Here
is a full-blown example (Ohio, 1956):

Are you a member of an organization that is dedicated to the
destruction of religion, dedicated to the destruction of the entire
Judo [sic] -Christian concept upon which his Nation is founded?

Picking up steam, he continues, "Are you a member of any organization
which is an atheistic organization, dedicated to the destruction of
religion, the sterility of the individual, of all concepts of God. . . .?"

The witness, who of course has been sworn, is called upon not merely
to answer the question, but to answer it, "Now that you are under oath."
When Arens asked a leading West Coast minister a question so prefaced,
his lawyer in vain protested. "Is there any suggestion the witness is
not under oath? . . . There is no point in asking this man, this witness,
if he is under oath while he is under oath. This is unnecessarily
offensive to the witness."

When the witness challenges the pertinence of a question, it is a cue
for a renewed exposure attack, Listen to Arens explain to a witness why
he is being interrogated: "We understand, and we have received testimony
from 'live witnesses identifying you . . . as part and parcel of that
movement, as a dedicated zealot of the Communist conspiracy in the
United States who masquerades behind the Constitution of the United
States, and would desecrate the flag of this great Nation. . . . And I
propose, if you will tell us whether or not, while you are under oath,
you are in the conspiracy of the Communist Party, to interrogate you
at length with reference to plans and proposals and designs of this
conspiracy which were taken from premises under your custody and
control."

When the witness takes refuge in the plea of the privilege against
self-incrimination, or of the First Amendment, Arens has another go at
him (New England, 1958): "Maybe you do not know what you are declining
here, I just ask you if you think that is a pretty serious charge to
level against a man. He is in the underground apparatus of a foreign-
controlled conspiracy to overthrow the Nation, under whose flag he
obtained protection. Don't you think that is a kind of serious charge
to make against a man? Would you like to express yourself on that, or
am I probing into your thoughts?"

A witness who declined on constitutional grounds to discuss his
participation in a group known as "Coalition for Freedom and Democracy"
was asked, "You certainly wouldn't be ashamed of being in a coalition
for freedom and democracy would you -- unless it was a false freedom
and false democracy under the auspices of a conspirational apparatus?"

When the witness objects to the loaded character of the questioning,
he finds himself attacked from a new direction. A witness in the Los
Angeles 1956 hearings was asked about his relationship to an
organization known as the Southern California Peace Crusade: "Kindly
tell us while you are under oath now and in the aura of patriotism
which you have surrounded yourself in the opening statement, whether
or not you betrayed your country by being executive secretary of this
organization designed to subvert the security of this great Nation?"
The witness protested that "there is a condemnation attached to the
question." Arens tauntingly rephrased it, "For the moment may we
change to say were you executive secretary of this innocent little
organization, this patriotic organization, this organization for the
uplift of humanity, the Southern California Peace Crusade?" Note the
sarcastic diminutive in the preceding quotation. Arens is very fond of
this device: "In 1949 did you go to New York City for a little session
of the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born?"
(Youngstown, 1956).

A minister complains that the question, "Are you now, or have you ever
been, a member of a godless conspiracy controlled by a foreign power"
is improper because its characterization contains a value judgment
based on opinion. Arens insists that the protesting witness has waived
the privilege against self-incrimination and should be required to
answer because he has "voluntarily" dealt with the subject matter of
the question.

Many witnesses fear that to answer any "political" question (even
about espionage) might be considered a waiver of the privilege for
all purposes and ultimately lead to an informing demand. Arens asks
the questions of the witness which he knows could be truthfully
answered in a completely exculpatory way, but which the witness feels
obliged to decline to answer in order to preserve his constitutional
privilege -- a trick perfected by the late Senator McCarthy. When it
becomes clear that the witness intends to plead the privilege broadly
out of fear of waiver, Arens throws all restraint to the winds and
wallows in what amounts to a parody of a movie-style courtroom scene.
In a loud staccato, he asks (perfectly sure that the question will be
unanswered): "Now, sir, I put it to you as a fact and ask you to
affirm or deny the fact that you are part of an enterprise to destroy
the very constitution of the United States under which we all have
protection, that you are the agent of the Communist Party as an arm
of the international Communist conspiracy sent into Atlanta for the
purpose of engaging in conspiratorial activities on behalf of the
Communist Party. It that is not so, deny it under oath."

Arens is not always sure how far he can use the question as a means
of testifying against the witness. Thus, in the 1956 Seattle hearings,
he first tested out a witness: "I . . . ask you while you are under oath
to affirm or deny the fact that you are an expert in the Communist
underground conspiratorial apparatus and in garroting?" When the
witness pleaded the self-incrimination privilege to this question,
Arens tells him: "I put it to you as a fact, sir, that you were
trained in the underground school to garrote for the International
Communist conspiracy. Now deny that, you are under oath."

Not a scrap of evidence was introduced in the record to supply a
factual foundation for these questions.

On occasion, early in the hearing, the Committee stages a confrontation,
which is a device for dramatizing the unfriendly witness' identification
by the informer. The informer physically points to (the argot is
"fingers") the victim and states that he knew him as a Communist. The
feat is usually performed by an undercover agent; few ex-Communist
friendly witnesses are called upon to do it.

Mr. Arens: While you are under oath, would you kindly look at the
gentleman who has just testified? Look him in the face and tell this
committee while you are under oath and while he is under oath, did he
or did he not tell the truth when he said he knew you as a Communist?

Mr. Scherer: I ask that you direct the witness to look at the witness Wereb.

Mr. Doyle: So that the record will show, I instruct you to face the witness,
Mr. Wereb, who has, under oath, sworn that he knew you as a member of the
Communist Party, and ask if you recognize him.

A more conventional form of confrontation runs like this: "The previous
witness laid his liberty on the line, and said that he knew you as a
member of the Communist conspiratorial apparatus. While you are under
oath, stand up like a red-blooded American and tell the Committee was
he lying or telling the truth."

The witness, of course, would never be permitted to cross-examine
his accuser -- that is not the practice of legislative investigating
committees, explains Mr. Arens. As for the informer laying his liberty
on the line, it would be the height of fantasy to suppose that the
Committee would bite the hand that feeds it by challenging in any way
the veracity of the undercover agent.

Confrontations are good for headlines; they make the hearings coruscate
with sinister emanations of hidden guilt. Another device which
accomplishes a similar purpose is the offer of immunity from prosecution.
Most lawyers are convinced that the Committee lacks the power to give
immunity to a witness. But that makes no difference -- it creates the
impression that he is concealing secrets of such vast import to the
Nation's security -- espionage, sabotage -- that every legal resource
must be exploited to overcome his silence. Other favorite tactics are
votes to recommend contempt, denaturalization, deportation, withdrawal
of defense contracts, Department of Justice investigation into the bona
fides of a Taft-Hartley non-Communist affidavit, etc.

As the hearing moves along, the Committee never loses sight of the
main problem -- to steep the witness in an atmosphere of crime, treason
and sedition. One way of building a record against the witness is
deliberately to force him to plead the Fifth Amendment over and over
again by asking a flurry of questions all falling within the same area.
The Committee knows from the initial response that the witness will
refuse to answer, but a high score is good for headlines (Local Man
Pleads Fifth Forty Times) and helps sharpen the exposure consequences.
Sometimes the Committee pointedly comments in the record on the
frequency of the plea. (Congressman Clardy: "I hope the gentleman isn't
a drinking man . . . thirty-four fifths taken in less than half an hour
is quite a lot.")

The questions are frequently used in this multiplication game to give
the Committee the air of a prosecutor who is on to something big but
is frustrated by the silence and evasiveness of the witness. (Did the
witness have a mimeograph machine in his basement ten years ago? Was
he present at a party at which the guests consumed a cake frosted with
a hammer and sickle? Did he ever live at a given address 15 years
earlier?) The impression which the Committee wants to leave with its a
udience and the press is that it has access to damning intelligence
data implicating the witness in serious crimes.

A special contribution of Mr. Arens to the "cops and robbers"
sweepstakes is to request the witness to sign the voucher for his
witness fee on the record. He explains to the witness (and to the
press) that he wants the signature to compare with the signature on
a document in the Committee's possession (a letter, election petition,
or a certificate of incorporation) which it regards as proof of
subversion. A witness, fearful that he might lose the fee, may sign.
Usually he pleads the Fifth Amendment. Arens then informs him that
when he signs for his fee after the hearing, the signatures will be
compared -- a marvelous ploy for the gooseflesh trade.

A special form of the numbers game is the practice of ordering the
unfriendly witness to identify others, HUAC knows that the witness
will refuse -- many witnesses plead the Fifth Amendment primarily to
avoid becoming informers. The Committee likes to do this in order to
smear particular individuals whom it dislikes, such as critics of the
Committee. It thinks that the refusal of an unfriendly witness to
identify others on Fifth Amendment grounds helps to expose him. The
Committee will do this even where it is obvious that the individuals
asked about have nothing to do with the matter under inquiry. It
asks a recalcitrant witness to testify about persons attending a
social gathering at which he was present. A witness who ran a summer
camp for children was grilled in this way by Congressman Doyle:

Mr. Doyle: Counselors?

Witness: These are high school kids who help the kids have a good time.

Mr. Doyle: Tell me definitely the name of one counselor that you had
last summer. . . . Tell me the name of one person. . . . You would not have
any hesitation about giving the names of your counselors in executive
session, would you? . . . Do you have a list of the counselors who were
at your camp last summer? . . . And the addresses of the counselors are
on that list . . . are they not?

The grand strategy of the Committee is, of course, to discredit the
Fifth Amendment and to equate its use with guilt. The witness is
frequently told that this plea is a direct clue to his guilt. A
favorite ploy is to "test the good faith" of the pleader by asking
a question which has no relevance to any legitimate inquiry but which
invites the surmise that the witness is a knave -- especially when
he refuses to answer on the Fifth Amendment grounds. ("Are there any
organizations [addresses] that you could tell about which would not
supply information which might be used against you in a criminal
proceeding?")

Witnesses, with increasing frequency, try to foil the Committee's
exposure game by denying present membership, but pleading the Fifth
Amendment as to the past (the diminished Fifth). The Committee tries
hard to make it appear that this is a trick, a Communist tactic. It
asks a series of questions which push back by small increments of time
the period of denial. Were you a Communist before you entered this
room? A month ago? Six months ago? A year ago? In 1958?

This creates an unpleasant dilemma. The witness can answer "no" at a
given point and plead the privilege beyond that point. But this answer
in effect surrenders the plea by pinpointing the failure to deny
earlier than a particular date. If he pleads as to each question in
the time sequence (after having denied generally as to the past), the
Committee makes it appear that he is a concealed Communist of one sort
or another: "under discipline," "a member not of the formal entity but
of the Communist operation," "a part of the Communist underground,"
etc. The logic of the exposure process compels the Committee constantly
to move to ever more direct forms of condemnation, naked of even a fig
leaf of legislative pretense. This sometimes takes the form of
rhetorical questions:

Have you formed any Committee for the Protection of the Hungarians?

Now tell us what you have done to protect the flag of this country by
your activities in connection with congressional committees?

You are certainly not ashamed as one who has sworn to defend this great
Republic to state what you have done to protect the helpless foreign-
born, would you? Unless they happened to be Communist conspirators?

Have you betrayed the flag that you were sworn to uphold?

Are you familiar with the very first Psalm, "Blessed is the man that
walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly"? [asked of a minister].

Mr. Velde asks a witness (Youngstown, 1956): "Whose side are you on in
the revolt, Soviet Union's or the rebels?" The witness replies, "I am
on the rebels' side."

But Velde is not satisfied with the witness' answers to other questions,
so he concludes, "From the witness' appearance and demeanor before this
Committee, I am satisfied that he bears watching by the duly constituted
authorities. I do not think he is on the side of the rebels. I think he
is on the side of Moscow, the Soviets."

The late Tom O'Connor, a liberal newspaper man, was interrogated in
1952 about a charge that he had been a Communist in 1938. Congressman
Velde asked him:

"Are you a member of the Communist Party now?"

"No, Sir," O'Connor replied.

"Were you a year ago?" "No, sir."

"Were you five years ago?" "No, sir."

"Were you ten years ago?" "No, sir."

Velde had no further questions, but made the followIng comment:

I personally can draw only one inference, that you are not only a past
member of the Communist Party, but that you continue to be a member of
the Communist Party and that you are an extreme danger to the country
as the managing editor of a large New York newspaper.

The Committee uses the record to injure the witness in other ways. It
recently held hearings in Pittsburgh to which it called a number of
foreign-born witnesses who cannot be deported because the proof of
their deportability is defective or because there is no country to
which they can be deported. It filled the entire record with the
Immigration and Naturalization Service dossiers on each of them. If a
witness has been in trouble with the law -- a tax case, contempt of
court, a labor offense -- HUAC brings it out "for purposes of
identification."

As the frenetic Arens slows down, the Committee members take over.
A few of them take an active role in the assault on the witness. The
fire-eating Scherer glares at the witness, sneeringly comments on his
responses, throws out a running fire of disparagement and insult. He
specializes in perfecting the record for a contempt case. He stands
guard to make sure the witness does not "dance away from," or "weasel
out of" a question.

Congressman Kearney -- a former general and a leader of the Veterans
of Foreign Wars -- grunts his disapproval of the witness and joins in
the attack in a rough-hewn style ("I am astounded at this character").

Congressman Doyle -- a lawyer -- likes to take over the questioning
when the witness is about to be excused, seeking to wear him down into
making disclosures he has already refused to make. He specializes in
an evangelical approach: "Why don't you get yourself and keep yourself
in shape as a young American citizen, when you don't have to plead
your constitutional privileges. . . . This country has honored you by
giving you birth. Why the dickens do you get into an atmosphere . . .
where you have to refuse to help your own Congress . . . to work out
what is just and fair in the field of legislation involving the cold
war we are in with Soviet Communism. I suggest if you do it, you will
feel a whole lot better inside."

As with many a frustrated evangelist, Doyle rains curses on the
unconverted, virtually inciting a lynching of his hapless victim: "I
think the great majority of people who are in this room, as well as
the American public, whenever they think of you, will look at you
with shame when you have called this sort of thing an inquisition. . . .
The trouble is, we do not have enough help to expose the real intended
purpose of people who write filth such as you have written in these
papers."